I realised this morning that this blog was killed without warning, but the killing was only ritualistic because I’ve moved to another name, here. Come read, follow!
The Chastity of Crocheting
Zadie Smith writes because it is the only way she gains control. In a pandemic when everything is outside of this much revered control, to write is to secretly believe that everything is completely fine. Isolation is not a problem because it is welcome; it is a space within which writing happens in picture perfect reality of coffee mug plus laptop plus Alice Munro’s New Selected Short Stories. What is hidden in the fine print is that the appeal of this isolation is rudely eaten away by the new-very-serious danger of proximity. It is no more a trend to sit at the corner table in Glen’s (the one by the plug point) and drink very yummy iced tea and pretend to write for two hours and then actually write for fifteen minutes only. What to do now except to learn how to make iced tea at home, but not the lipton kind because that has so much sugar and diabetes has never been trendy.
Not sitting in Glen’s is okay because now there is no room for restlessness that makes you worry about being made to leave sooner than you want. Sitting alone in a coffee shop brings with it noise but all of the noise exists in the outside, so the luxury of not having to take ownership of conversation is welcome and turns people into quickly formed caricatures fueled by interpretation. At home, this noise is intimate. Every sentence uttered is a sentence to be responded to and the pressure of the response rests inside the ears until it transforms into the hiss of a cooker that is loud, oh very loud.
Ursula le Guin says in an essay that we must write stories but not for the sake of conflict because conflict is endless, it is boring and exists only to please the hero so that the heroic can become more heroic and the unheroic can continue to live in perpetual isolation. She says that fiction must be a bag in which we put words and subsequently, stories. The carrier bag of my fiction contains within it potatoes today but they haven’t been put there on purpose. In the breaks between trying to write and not trying to write, the potatoes snuck in, crawling on the larvae of little yellow worms and found their way into my fiction. Because it is impossible to make them go away now, the only solution is to write more and more and bury them in stories that are dressed in different, healthier vegetables. Maybe even avocados.
In the between formed by trying to write and not trying to write is when this isolation makes room for thought and the creation of Ways to Pass Time. One of these hobbies has taken the shape of a crochet hook and yarn that got so horribly entangled that it took four hours of two days to fully untangle. Once the ball of yarn has been neatly put into place, it can remain safe because there are no cats around to play with it. Sometimes, it is fun to throw around but not too often because the yarn will unravel and unravel so much that the crochet hook will keep getting stuck till there is no room for it, so you have to push very hard. One secret about crocheting they don’t tell you is that conversation about crochet is the same as describing sex.
See, first you have to take the hook and put the yarn around it and then look carefully and put it inside the loop but not in the bottom part, but in the top part. Then yarn over but make sure it’s not too tight otherwise you will have to push in very hard because it’ll be a tight fit and your hand will get very tired.
It is a good thing that the actual process of crochet does not require the narration of it. It would not be a surprise otherwise to find correlations between the art of the crochet and the heightening of libidos. Although it is perhaps safe to admit that thoughts of pushing through uncomfortable tightness isn’t very arousing after all.
The repeated in-and-out, in-and-out of my crochet hook has lead to the production of a beanie that is very pink and little imperfect but also has imprints of wisdom from Jia Tolentino and Carmen Maria Machado, who are actually great companions in this endless, rude self-isolation. It is a discovery to note that Rebecca Solnit is not as favoured as the others. The reasons for this are many, but the primary is that Rebecca Solnit’s voice is much like the white woman in that long, white, chikan kurta sitting in the corner of road on that one night in Gokarna. This is a non-issue because while reading her books, it is my voice I can hear and even if it is a weirdly thick voice, I have been with it all my life so no surprises there.
The beanie took one week to make and required one row of single crochet and three rows slip stitches and then repeated till big enough. Even though my hand is now very practiced and I really know what I’m doing, sometimes my stitches are too tight and the hook has to be pushed and pushed till the yarn finally makes room for me. I say to my mother that I have birthed this little thing. The disgust she looks at me with puts in my imagination my lovely lovely beanie covered in placenta and afterbirth.
This is unfortunate, but I move past it quickly, sitting warm in the knowledge that the project is now over, each stitch imprinted with the words of writers who are comfortable with knowing that they haven’t mastered this lockdown thing. Maybe the next project can be a carrier bag for real and it can contain not worm-y potatoes but books of these women and my small, trusty kindle.
Jade is dying now
I haven’t slept all (only enough to italicize, not make bold) night. I tossed and turned in my blanket until folded itself under me again and again so that when I tried to turn again, it caught me and told me to fuck off so I woke up and looked around the dark room. The reflection of a car driving by sneaked its way through the curtains and I wondered where it was going who it was taking and I hope it’s not an emergency. I haven’t slept at all because I was thinking and thinking. Is there something to be said about 2 am ideas that seem so deviously lovely that even sleep must stay far away? The piece I wrote all night while I wasn’t asleep was the best one I have written yet, maybe even better than the one I wrote in the shower as the cold cold water hit my face and I imagined a world in which I don’t stop after writing for two minutes. But the thing is, I haven’t slept all night so I’ve actually forgotten the piece I wrote all night; what was it about anyway? About the dream I had three days ago? That one in which I was 18 again and I didn’t know anything at all so there was lots and lots to learn; or was it of the friend who I forgot to text four weeks ago and now feel a deep deep longing for; but who is going to open whatsapp and scroll and scroll and then *bleh* apologise for being a dick? But the thing is, I haven’t slept all night so this remorse is old now and so I just place my feet into my pink-very-pink slippers and walk to my balcony and look at the huge sky with the clouds and the blue and the trees at the edge. I turn around a little bit and look at the 27 plants sitting by the wall and see that the mini jade I bought a year ago is dying now. Yellowly and slowly.
On Banana Bread
The first time Mumma made banana bread was on day 10 of the lockdown. S stood with her in the kitchen wearing black shorts and a grey t-shirt that found its way into my cupboard more often than not. Mumma was tired already, having had to cook every day for seven people and the pain in her back had started to radiate to her legs (I imagined red wires of pain slowly slowly claiming her body); but she wanted to cook for fun this time, and I’ve learnt not to argue with her.
They used a recipe S had found, and together they both hunched over a large yellow bowl of batter as they ticked off ingredients. The everyday heat of April had made its way into my body and I only stayed in the kitchen for a moment before patches of sweat made my own t shirt cling to my body.
An hour later, when the banana bread was ready, they brought it out in small tins. I watched S cut the pieces slowly, carefully, and hand me one; her fingers trembling a little from heat that still remained in the bread.
Banana bread used to belong only to airports. In a Starbucks at the corner of Dilli airport, Papa and I sat down for coffee. He decided that we owe ourselves a treat and gave me his debit card. I returned to the table with one blueberry muffin and one slice of banana bread wrapped in clingfilm. As I peeled the clingfilm off, little pieces of the bread stuck to the plastic and I noticed (like I always did), the little black spots on the bread. I broke off half a piece and gave it to papa, while I kept the rest in my bag, to be had only when really really hungry (just before the stomach threatens to ingest itself).
The piece S offered me was also covered in similar black spots, and I noticed the shine of oil on her fingers. It was soft and warm, and as I took it from her, a small piece fell to the ground.
—
The second time Mumma made banana bread, we were fighting. The lockdown had entered days that we stopped counting, and we were fighting. I’d just watered the garden on our terrace and the water clung to my legs. My feet were covered in leaves, bordered by the v-shaped tan that was now very permanent. I sat at the dining table with the others and our voices gradually rose. I don’t remember what we said or why we fought, but Mumma slammed her palms on the table and we all stopped talking.
“I’m going to make banana bread. All of you get lost.”
Some months ago, banana bread found its way into Chai Point boxes on department evenings; when the sky was pink or orange or yellow. In white boxes dampened by oil stains, two 3D triangle pieces of banana bread sat in anticipation, as we poured elaichi chai into small yellow cups. With chai ready in one hand, the bread then made its way to each one of us slowly, quietly; everyone too immersed in conversation to pay attention to the warmth of the bread or its black spots.
—
The third time Mumma made banana bread, I asked her why. She looked at me with irritation, a glare hidden around the corner, “don’t you see how many bananas are getting spoiled? Apna kaam kar jaake.”
I laughed at her and went back to looking at the book I was reading — an old old book that I had picked up at a garage sale. The already-faded letters expanded as I looked at them so I looked back at Mumma. S was at work this time, and Papa was in his room. N and I had nowhere to go so we sat the dining table as Mumma whipped the batter into whatever it needed to be.
When it was ready two hours later, the letters of my book had returned to their regular size and I looked up as Mumma handed me a piece. It was warm and the edges had hardened into a crust; I took a bite before I could notice the black spots and she asked me how it was.
“Not as good as the first time,” I said to her, as a little piece broke off and fell to the ground.
Meta Diaries: Of Teaching and Love
Very rarely does there come along a moment that stays my fluttering attention span. This is not for the fault of anyone but my own: there is always too much I want to do but there is never enough time or energy to do it. When I wake up on Meta mornings, my body groans in disapproval. My eyes want to remain closed in perpetual tiredness. But there is a part of me that goes beyond thought — this is the part of me that is able to get out of bed and drag my body to college while slurping down my everyday breakfast of bread-butter. This part of me has recognised that my world is not about me and it has never been about me. This is also the part of me that knew from the beginning that Meta is mine but it has never belonged to me.
My attention span doesn’t hold a candle to the endless Meta moments I’ve been able to witness. I fell sick halfway through Meta and my sickness forced me to pause and stay away from college and the department. I looked at pictures on insta and twitter and facebook (the social media team is at it) and I imagined being there. I realise that there is no difference — my being there or not has very little do with the fest itself and more to do with my own learning. In those two days, I missed two panels and several talks that I feel very sorry to have missed. But this missing is quiet. It is something I can contain within a neat little box of all things negative.
It took being a teacher to learn that Meta has very little to do with teachers. It has everything and everything to do with the students that this fest gives space to; either as volunteers or participants. As a student, whenever I read rumlolarum.com’s Meta-related posts, I was a little bit envious of her fascination with the students who found themselves at Meta. This envy has blossomed into a full-blown epiphany as I watch students begin to volunteer and move around with more purpose than they used to have before. Much of what I learnt about my own privilege has come from conversations at Meta. During such conversations with friends, I realised that most of us speak with an entitlement that makes us believe that spaces and people and things belong to us. There is an innate insecurity within all of us that wants to claim a space for ourselves — so that when this space ever belongs to someone else, there is bitterness and anger and resentment. But there is no room for any of this at Meta.
Instead, there is Akhila from New Horizon College who came to Bollygood very late and registered on the spot. She walked up to the stage and began singing Kolaveri Di very confidently. After two words, she stopped herself and said, “this is for all the girls okay?” Everyone began hooting then only and I realised that she wasn’t singing Kolaveri Di but Kolaveri Da. Akhila denounced men with a courage I haven’t been able to find yet. The anti-feminist in that one science class would shiver at the sight of her.
I don’t know what it is yet, but Meta offers its students some insane combination of intimacy and learning that makes space for everyone. My fondest Meta moments have been at the Banyan tree, simply for the energy this offers us, and yet I have no idea how to define this energy. Jemimah, a former classmate, performed for us the other day. She sat at the corner of the stage with ukulele in hand and sang for us very softly. All of us — about 25 people — sat swaying lightly to the songs she was singing. The (endangered) roots of the Banyan tree also swayed little little and I knew for sure that Meta had arrived.
Prof. Vijeta Kumar’s Session
I keep wondering where this energy comes from — this energy to run the festival on top of all the everyday nonsense that we have to deal with. The organisers must deal with a work induced exhaustion that only comes from dealing with bureaucracy. On bad days, this drains everything. On good days, it is irrelevant.
On the last day of Meta, I found the source of this energy.
The last two staff sessions — Prof. Vijeta Kumar’s and Prof. Arul Mani’s — stabilised every thought. When Vijeta ma’am began her session, the hall was full and I could see that she was nervous. After she began, Loyola hall found room for more people as they entered, arms pressed against their bodies to fight the overbearing heat of the room. But no one cared. They only cared about her and Anjana Suresh and Tenzin Palper and Dhanush and Babasaheb. When Prof. Arul Mani’s session began soon after, the room expanded with his translation. He ended his session with reminding us that teaching is an act of love, that if there is no love in teaching, we shouldn’t do it anyway. When everyone in the hall cheered and cheered at this, Arul sir smiled to himself as he usually does and I knew then why they run Meta year after year.
The cake that the students brought for them had pictures of them both holding umbrellas; the message said, “thank you for throwing shade on us” and I learnt only much much later how many meanings this has. Most people in the room were students of both these teachers; some of them also my classmates. The classmates who came for these sessions were two women who were on a panel in my final year. Usually very quiet, these women were unbelievably mind blowing that day, speaking at a panel on Rohith Vemula. I’m a little bit in awe of the kind of strength it must take for teachers to simply see quiet students — the students who don’t want to speak, who don’t want to be noticed. Those who feel like they have nothing to say, those who have been constantly made to feel like they are not the ‘smart’ ones.
Having taught for a measly six months now, I have learnt only this: classroom spaces are dominated by boys and girls who already know what to say and how to say it. Sometimes, they are not dominated by these people also and it feels like there is no one to teach. At Meta, I learnt that this will forever forever be untrue. There will always be at least a student or two who is listening and it is the responsibility of the teacher to speak in the language that students can find homes in. These students don’t even know that they are listening most of the time, but there is something they will remember and find it in themselves to come back. Inevitably, these students are quiet, they are unsure, they are soft.
I have been wondering why the classroom space manages to evade these students, as if the classroom itself is not competent enough to teach those who are different. This is a loss, one that can be compensated for outside of the classroom.
At Meta, the difference of students is acknowledged; it is celebrated with the love that teaching sometimes forgets to carry. In this space, we are taken away from the accuracy of our sentences towards the stories we hope to tell one day.
The Art of Prompt Giving
This hiss of the tubelight remains in my head much after it has been replaced with yellower LED lights. In all good stories of women who write and are written about, they sit in yellow lights as if white light is too harsh for them. Maybe this is true, like when I look at myself in the mirror in the dark and think oh-wow-my-hair-is-not-frizzy but in real life my hair sits on my head like it doesn’t want to be there. Perhaps the white of the tubelight is this.
Or maybe there is something to be said about the softness of yellow light, like how it comes on quietly, without bother. Unlike its harsher companion which blinks and blinks and blinks in persistent sounds of static before coming on fully.
But actually the whole thing now is that I was asked to give a prompt yesterday. The student with the big eyes who sits in the last row of class who also really loves to write and recognizes the need for details — she asked me for a prompt and I looked around and thought and thought. In school when we wanted to insult someone for being too slow or having a realization too late we said very loudly, tubelight; so as I looked at the light in class I knew that there was no better prompt to give.
One day later, now I also know that I have forgotten to write with prompts. No no, there is no self-pity or anything but I have really forgotten what it feels like to listen to a word and feel small small pinches of excitement, that feeling in which I know that oh wow now I’m going to write the best piece ever. It’s okay because I finally read the Patricia Lockwood piece that I was supposed to read some days ago and she tells me not to worry about loss and the walls that are now between me and my writing. It is also okay because Paromita Vohra is reminding me not to be angry about my own feminism and when I go to classes, first I laugh at myself and then glare at my students when they feel like they can laugh at me too.
But what was I saying and why have I digressed? The thing about tubelights is that they used to once house bees and lizards whenever the tiny devils entered my room and the incessant buzz buzz buzz of the bees still sits in my head stubbornly. The thing about tubelights is also that the tubelight was right above my bed and sometimes I really felt like a tubelight. It is okay now to feel like a tubelight because references to pop culture are not so important, and if you understand a joke a few minutes too late then it is even sweeter because you have worked for the joke to be understood and your laughter was earned.
See, another thing about the tubelight I am learning only now is that it is okay if I forgotten how to write with a prompt because if I just keep typing, some words will have to be written and then I can put this piece up on my blog and pretend like I really have written.
How to Stop Being Afraid and Other Questions
I have an innate flaw that I don’t fully believe is a flaw to begin with. However it is true that my reading life is somewhat put on hold because of this. This flaw demands that whenever I read a woman, I must fall in love with her obsessively. This means that when I am reading, I am in love and when I am not reading, I am in love with the writer I have just read.
In reading Machado, this flaw becomes an important tool with which I can read her wholly and completely. I am okay with this because I am used to falling in love obsessively. But when it happens with books and their writers, this love morphs into love that is outside of the romantic. It enters my every day and doesn’t allow me to be. When I read Machado for the first time in class number 404 in the Humanities block of college, I read the story as if I wasn’t really reading. You know how sometimes the words are written just right and you feel like you just have to lay back and let the writer do to you whatever she wants to? Reading Machado is like (using the images borrowed from her book) letting someone go down on you. There is not much you can do except lie there and be ready (and greedy).
That is what reading The Husband Stitch is like.
Later, in reading Ekphrasis, I realise very quickly that I mustn’t take Machado for granted. That I must pay more attention than I have been paying. In Ekphrasis, Machado forces her reader to sit up, sit up and listen already. Read, decide what you want to read, where you want to go, how you want to proceed.
Imagine then, my absolute delight in reading In The Dream House. In the Dream House which forces me to live through her life with her but also In The Dream House in which I do nothing but let her dictate for me what she wants me to feel (also to be noted: In The Dream House which reminds me so much of my own Dream House).
The Dream House is Machado’s own personal hell, the hell owned by the Woman in the Dream House, who Machado is in an abusive relationship with for a long time. For a moment, I try to imagine describing this book in a few words, a few words which will summarise for me what this book does for conversation in queer circles (abuse in same sex relationships; the woman as abuser), or what it does for a fat woman to read, or what it does by explaining love and abuse.
I cannot begin to describe it.
In The Dream House is all of this but so much more.
Machado gives to us the Dream House in different forms. The Dream House is Déjà Vu, it is Picaresque, it is Escape, it is Queer Villainy. Her voice changes with every micro chapter, from the first person Machado in the present to second person Machado from the past. In trying to make sense of, in dissecting and putting together, I realise again that I, as reader, am inconsequential to the book. After I have come across the chapter titled Déjà Vu for the third time, I realise that everything has changed. The abusive relationship that she is charting out for us has gone from loving to abusive inconspicuously— like it is happening in real life, when you wake up one day and realise that you don’t really want to force yourself to purge anymore because even though the number on the weighing scale is becoming smaller, it just hurts.
—
I know before I begin reading the book that I am in love with Machado on two levels. One level on which she is writer extraordinaire, the level on which I will give my left arm to write like her. Another level is that on which she is a real-life Goddess — a goddess who is gay and also fat and is also a writer. Through her memoir I also then learn that she feels too intensely, I learn that her first relationship was a disaster of unforeseeable magnitude simply because she believed that she, as a fat woman, was lucky to have been loved by someone, anyone. I also learn later, that when she is able to leave the Woman in the Dream House, it happens without preamble, it happens slowly, when she decides simply that she will not answer her phone anymore. I learn all of these things through fear, but through the fear there is also relief because I am sure that I have just been handed the manual of my life.
I don’t realise it, but throughout my reading, I expect the abuse to end with some kind of justification, with some tipping of the scales that balances the order of the good and the bad. But there is no clean ending even if there is a happy ending. I feel now like I felt when two weeks ago, my therapist looked at me and said that our work was over. The intense abandonment that I felt later was almost laughable, particularly because of the eventlessness of it. The progress of Machado’s memoir is something like this. Our need for narrative compels us to look for straight lines and stories that fit perfectly, but Machado does none of this. She gives us theories on abuse and love and lovers and just queerness, and she does this in a way I didn’t know I needed.
—
I remember now, the first time I heard the term gaslighting. I read that it was what someone did when they made you feel like you’re reading too much into something. I was a little bit angry because I couldn’t help but feel that I had been victim of the same senseless process in the past, however the perpetrator was not someone else but me. Through the form of her memoir, Machado reminds me how easy it is to do this — to stop trusting yourself in this endless cycle of insecurity, especially when you have someone in front of you, someone you are so in love with — tell you that nothing is wrong, that everything is okay, that you’re simply thinking too much. She asks the reader, and herself, several times throughout the book, why don’t you leave why don’t you leave why don’t you leave? There is no remorse or pity, but simply a frustration that is very real. The question isn’t being asked in search for an answer, but simply because it exists and there is an answer somewhere.
More than halfway through the book, Machado changes form to give us the same Ekphrasis–like interactive narrative. She forces her reader to go through the endless loop of her abuse — if you apologized then go to page 163, if you apologized then go to page 163, if you apologized then go to page 163. I stopped reading, I stopped because I had to remind myself that I wasn’t stuck in the same cycle — Machado was just generous enough to lend me the horror of her cyclic abuse and I felt grateful that I was simply holding the book and not living its story.
—
There is much more to say and much more that can be said — about the writer and the way in which she writes with chutzpah. There is also more I can say about the sheer genius of narrative, of the way in which her chapters make so much sense that I lose whatever sense I have left.
But for now,
I imagine sitting with Machado,
wearing a green ribbon on my neck,
and asking her questions.
I ask her about fatness and queerness, about writing and queerness, about writing and fatness. But I end with the one question I have been asking her throughout the book, the one I will keep asking:
how do you stop being afraid?
End of Day Things
I haven’t been writing much recently, but my everyday has found a way to take my writing and make it the centre of my attention. As I sit in my room now, surrounded not by my blanket, but the ugly beginnings of lots of different pieces, I can only laugh a little and hope that the writing will come to me some day, some time. In whatever pieces I have begun, I speak of heartbreak and love. In some others, I speak of loneliness. In the remaining few, I speak of Deepika Padukone.
Today has been long. I spent most of it at the hospital for one minor illness after the other, but as I feel my eyes drooping shut now, I find in myself an energy I don’t usually locate. This energy comes to me once a month and reminds me of every ambition I have ever had. I am only surprised because this energy has lasted 24 hours already, and my anxiety riddled body hasn’t found a way to send it away yet.
It has now been two weeks since my last therapy session and I am feeling okay. I wonder what I would have said to my therapist if we had a session today. Some months ago, just after I moved back home, A and I identified a numbness that I seem to have adopted as a coping mechanism as a young child. When this numbness takes over, I feel nothing except for a heaviness at the end of the day, manifesting itself into the beat of my heart — letting its loudness dominate every other sound I hear in the quiet of the night.
When I go to bed now, after having shut my laptop; in anticipation for whatever reading tomorrow will bring, I don’t know what my body will tell me. I am only relieved that I have now learned to listen.
On Watching Ankhon Dekhi
I begin watching Ankhon Dekhi with a class I’ve only taught once before. Last Saturday when we met, I’d just rewatched Bonnie and Clyde and spent my morning reading Pauline Kael. Mornings in the department belong to films I didn’t think I could ever be a part of. I remember sitting in the same Arts and Culture class two years ago — as a student then — and realizing that I don’t actually like watching films.
The epiphany came out of nowhere, in the middle of a discussion, but it relieved a burden I didn’t know I was carrying. My decision to not watch Anjaana Anjaani or Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani used to haunt me like forgotten books on clean bookshelves. Everyone laughed at me, I laughed at myself and we moved on to the next person with an odd relationship with films.
But while watching Ankhon Dekhi in class, I sighed and laughed with the students (who, I’m assuming, are the film-lover types). Ankhon Dekhi gave me back my Dilli that I lived in for two years. So while the film was about Bauji and his epiphanies and existentialism, I sat back and felt warm at words like Pahadganj and Daryaganj. The Delhi 6 where Rita’s wedding takes place in the film is the Delhi 6 that I spent most mornings and afternoons in. One day, S, K and I took a rickshaw to Chandni Chowk and ate chole bhature in an uncle’s shop where there was no place to stand. My body pressed against other bodies in familiar discomfort and we ate till we couldn’t eat anymore. In the adjoining lane, a young boy stood with his cycle, bearing a patila filled with Daulat ki chaat. Influenced by the likes of So Delhi and other instgrammers, S and I bought one plate to share — but what we got was sugary foam with tastes akin to the aftertaste of milk and two granules of sugar.
The small lanes and bylanes of Dilli scare you and comfort you at the same time. My small foray into this world happened through courses and books, through films and television. Delhi constructed itself as the utopia of my childhood and it still remains one.
Ankhon Dekhi hits me properly when Bauji and his troupe are in never-ending conversation about life and its problems. The friendships he creates (even though presented as guru-shishya relationships) follow him night and day, evening and afternoon. All the men gamble together in search for a life purpose. They need friendships to guide them, and they need conversation to keep them afloat. The betrayal felt by Sharmaji at Bauji’s rejection is resonant of regular type feelings of betrayal that I’ve also felt every few weeks. Ankhon Dekhi somehow manages to capture some kind of fragility in friendships that I’m still trying to negotiate.
In Dilli, A, K, S and I would go to the nearest smoke shop from the back gate of college and sit on misshapen rocks. I watched them smoke while drinking chai, making a show of how difficult it was for my asthamatic lungs to support the 500-m walk from college to smoke shop. They laughed at me while looking apologetic. S would take long drags of her cigarette and let out the smoke while facing away from me. I would laugh at her as the wind blew in my direction, bringing with it the self-serving cold of Delhi winter and the bitter smoke of countless cigarettes.
—
I went to Daryaganj only twice in two years. The first time I went there, the gaze of men on the roads and the heat of a Sunday morning attacked my body like unrelenting needles. I browsed through books quickly, hurriedly, as if in an effort to meet some kind of deadline. Later, I heard from T that Daryaganj contains within it several men who are questionable, and several men who are also questioned. While she was looking for books, she was stopped by a man who was bleeding through several stitches on his forehead. I don’t recall her story, but my mind has (un)helpfully constructed an image of a man I will never know or recognize.
The second time I found myself there, I was with a Bangalore friend who had been my adventure buddy several times before. We had seen Agra and Lucknow, Jaipur and Gokarna together. Dilli’s Daryaganj was only a street to be explored, how hard could it be? The footpath was covered in books, while shopkeepers sat by their books looking bored. Sometimes they stared at passers-by relentlessly, while other times they also called you out. When I spotted a copy of Byatt’s Possession, my heartbeat rate increased, as if demanding me to stop and buy the book. After I pointed to the book, the bhaiya walked over all his books and bent slowly to retrieve my treasure. I looked at the books he’d just walked over — looking a little bent, but otherwise unharmed — and smiled to myself in accomplishment. My Daryaganj adventure was a success.
Ankhon Dekhi doesn’t offer us any information about Daryganj apart from giving us its name. I was taken back to another encounter I had with Dilli 6. Aman Sethi’s Free Man told us of a Sadar Bazaar that I could barely begin to picture. Sethi speaks of men lying on roads and living lives very different from my own, and yet I identified a certain kind of Delhi-ness
I don’t know how to describe yet. On the way to college one day, when I saw the words ‘Sadar Bazaar’ glaring at me from a board at the ISBT signal, everything I had read about Sethi’s Delhi made sense. Soon after, a classmate (or it could have been me) spoke of going to Sadar Bazaar. In response, my always-well-dressed professor with salt and pepper hair laughed at us. “Have you ever been to Sadar Bazaar? Do you know what Sethi is describing?”
I felt foolish at my own ignorance, but I never dared to venture into the heart of Delhi, filled with men of the working classes, living on money they earn by the hours they work for. My association with Chandni Chowk gave me enough to imagine — I had the images in place, and I knew what Sethi’s Delhi looked like.
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At the end of Ankhon Dekhi when Bauji jumps to his death, I am envious because he doesn’t think of his jump towards anything. His jump was never about the destination of his fall but the journey that it will take him to get there. As he falls, I think of his wife who is awaiting his return in their hotel room in Alexander Resort (I’m tempted now to digress to my trips to the hills and the leftovers of friendships, but that is a story I must reserve for another blog entry).
I think of his home, with his son and his wife, and I think of the space he leaves behind in his absence. Ankhon Dekhi became for me a story of a city, it became the story of a city that allows its dwellers to think differently and be differently — simply because the city doesn’t notice it. Sitting in Bangalore now, Ankhon Dekhi has given me a Delhi I’m in love with. Perhaps tomorrow when I’m back there, I’ll find a film that becomes Bangalore.
Dilli Darshan — Red Fort
I’m afraid that if I begin to write about the city again, I will not get to see much more of it. I’m afraid that my much awaited Dilli Darshan will stop with a violence that I will recognize only months later, once I have left the city for good. I wonder now, what I will think then, in a time that isn’t Now. I wonder what it will mean to gain perspective and be away from the people who now seem to occupy a very large chunk of my life.
My version of the city is very much a part of these several wholes — my Dilli will always be about the people who showed me this city, first with a love unparalleled, and then from within the more comforting familiarity of friendship. I will not attempt to separate the city from the people it gave me. In the people-less void that is left behind as a result, I find something lukewarm, something opposite to the raw energy that I feel every day.
Yesterday, S and I went to Red Fort.
Unlike my previous (and one and only) Dilli Darshan adventure, this one felt less like an adventure. Perhaps it has something to do with familiarity, or perhaps it has more to do with the performance-related exhaustion of being New to the City.
Entering Red Fort and walking inside felt like a conscious effort to be happy, unlike my first visit to Jama Masjid, which felt like a vacation in the middle of reality. The awe I felt while standing in Jama Masjid was tangible — it comes back to me on good days, when the city feels more foreign than usual. I’m wondering now when this transition took place — when seeing Delhi stopped feeling like eating dosa after four months, and instead, feels like eating dosa for breakfast every morning.
In a class I’m taking this semester, we speak of Ghalib’s life in Chandni Chowk and his proximity to Red Fort and Jama Masjid. Sometimes, I imagine this poet walking the roads my friends and I walk, and I wonder why I am not more in love than I feel like I am; why I don’t feel more fortunate than I do feel.
There is something about being in a city that makes you blind to it. For the longest time, I was blind to Bangalore. Leaving the city felt like a loss I would never get over. Exactly one year ago, I spent days looking at the roads of Delhi and wondering why they couldn’t be more like Bangalore. I wondered why there weren’t Health n Glows in Delhi, and how the hell did people live in a city so large, that you couldn’t think of walking everywhere.
In small moments, Delhi started feeling more familiar, even if it might never be home. Walking the same roads of CP over and over again, in unending circles, will be an exercise I will never tire of. When on the cooler evenings, I sit outside campus and drink chai from the tapri, I feel a rawness I don’t know how else to describe. The reality of this city makes me pause and wonder how other people don’t see it, but perhaps it’s too large to see unless you’re looking for it; unless you’re doing nothing but looking for it.
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While Jama Masjid was about the monument and the roads and the food, Red Fort will now always be about conversation. While we sat on the grass and indulged in conversation without boundaries, I looked around at the people and wondered what they saw. I’m convinced that some people didn’t see anything history related at all. I don’t know how much history I saw myself, but I did see the people. In some of them, I saw picture-perfect images. The woman in the yellow suit looked like there was nowhere else she’d rather be. The men in the light blue jeans and bright coloured shirts looked like they belonged in badly taken selfies. Perhaps this image in my head has to do with watching these selfies being clicked. I wonder now if I’d ever be comfortable enough in my own skin to take a bad selfie with a monument in the background. I’m also wondering now if I really did only see men do this or if I forgot to look at the women taking bad selfies.
The uneventfulness of my visit to Red Fort upsets me. Tomorrow, it will not, and I already know why. In the last year, I have learnt that the only way to know a city intimately is to stop thinking about it. Much like the only way to achieve intimacy in a friendship is to stop thinking about it. When Dilli stopped being Dilli and instead became Delhi — a space I happened to live in, I began enjoying moments without having to memorialise them; without having to romanticize them. I find that this allowed me to enjoy these moments more, but the more I enjoyed them, the harder it became to articulate why they were important to me.
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On Dilli Darshan days, I use the metro. In the women’s compartment, I look at all the women around me, in various stages of passing-time and I feel strangely empowered. The feeling of smallness I enjoy from being in the metro echoes some ideas taught in Modernism classes, the word mundane comes to mind. At this point I wonder, how different are we from each other and why the fuck do we keep trying?
Mac & Keys 